Saturday, April 30, 2016

I once wrote a piece called “The Beast in the Dingle” which everybody
took as a parody. Actually it was a conscious attempt to write the story
as [Henry] James would have written it. Ross looked at it and said: “Goddamn
it, this is too literary; I got only fifteen percent of the allusions.”
My wife and I often tried to figure out which were the fifteen percent
he could have got.

I'm doing pretty well if I get 15% of any given piece of writing by Greil Marcus; sometimes I think he is actually making 75% of it out of whole cloth, a sort of avant garde experiment in criticism, like Nabokov's Pale Fire.